I’ve read eight more books since our last meeting including:
Hidden History of Civil War Savannah by Michael L. Jordan was a bit of a disappointment. The book is good enough, I suppose for what it is, the problem is there really wasn’t much going on in Savannah during the War. The book was only 160 pages long and the first 112 covered pretty much all the salient facts; A.H., Stephens’ secession speech, the loss of Ft Pulaski, a sketch of Savannah’s defenses, a chapter on the Confederate prison camp and their evacuation of the city when Sherman arrived, Sherman taking the city, and a sketch of the creation and fate of CSS Atlanta. And the book still had to be padded by including a lengthy (30+ pages) recitation of the history of the creation of several CSA monuments in the city. I guess it’s okay if you’re traveling to Savannah and want to get some background, but do yourself a favor and borrow it from the library.
97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman was also a bit of a disappointment. The book is connected with NYC’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum which has used census records and family reminiscences to create a very specific history of specific families in specific apartments on one NY tenement building. I was expecting a similar project on the dietary history of these families. Instead I got a more generic history of the dietary history of the successive waves of immigrants and how those immigrants influenced American foodways as a whole. It was good enough I suppose, and I did learn a great deal, I just felt like it was oversold.
Shogun by James Clavell is the story of an English pilot of a Portuguese ship cast ashore on 17th century Japan by a storm during the era when daimyo Yoshi Toranaga (a thinly disguised version of Ieyasu Tokugawa) is consolidating political and military power in Japan and establishing his Shogunate. The book was absolutely enthralling it provides a wealth of information about Japanese history and culture, the early Christian era in Japan, and I literally couldn’t put it down. I watched the mini-series with Richard Chamberlain when it first came out in 1980, and subsequently read the book. I somehow missed that the character Blackthorn was actually based on William Adams a real person whose adventures more or less followed those of the character in the book. Anyway, this one is highly recommended.
Voices from St. Simons: Personal Narratives of an Island’s Past by Stephen Dorster is a collection of oral histories by a series of interesting people who live or lived on St Simon’s Island off the GA Coast. I read it because I grew up in Liberty County GA, just up the coast from SSI and spent a fair amount of time on the island’s beach. It was okay. The era of the reminiscences was from the late 30’s to the early 60’s and didn’t include much of historical interest. Unless you’re headed to the island and are looking for some local flavor, you can skip this one.
The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History by Jonathan Horn is a weird biography of Lee focusing mostly on his connections to George Washington. I’m not sure about the source of the title, because the author is never explicit about how Lee could have been Washington, but I suppose I do concede that if Lee had accepted command of the US Army being raised to suppress the rebellion, or if he had simply resigned his US commission and sat out the war history would have been changed. Other than that, it was an okay book. The tone was fairly even-handed being neither a polemic against Lee nor a hagiography of him. I suppose it might make a decent first biography from someone who was interested in Lee, but didn’t want to wade through Freeman’s multi-volume opus.
BillP's Book Blog 